Advantage, Maria Sharapova. the tennis player has the serve, the looks, the money and the boyfriend. Ruby Warrington meets the Russian ace

Sports personalities are well versed in saying the right thing when they lose.
Speaking to the international press after ceding her French Open title to
her longtime nemesis, Serena Williams, earlier this month, Maria Sharapova
trotted out a familiar line. “I’m a competitor and a fighter, and I don’t
train to lose. Nobody does. So of course I’m disappointed,” she said,
shrugging. “But that’s the feeling that, ultimately, will make you work
harder. That gives you more determination to win next time.”

Having met her several weeks prior, however, I suspect that she was
devastated. Then, she joked about her insanely competitive streak — “I’ve
always had that mentality in everything I’ve done, even if it’s just
finishing a bowl of pasta before my friend” — but she also described winning
as giving her a feeling of “contentment”, an emotion that surely runs deeper
than the climactic high of holding a trophy above your head.

She can always console herself, with the fact that, according to Forbes
magazine, at 26, she has remained the highest-paid female athlete in the
world for eight years in a row. And if she is in any way bitter about her
latest loss, there’s the £14m in sponsorship and appearance fees she netted
last year alone (compared with £3m in prize money). Brands go absolutely
gaga for Sharapova — she has endorsement deals with Evian, Head, Samsung and
TAG Heuer — as do their customers. In 2011, sales of her Maria Sharapova
collection for Nike, and its then subsidiary company Cole Haan, doubled. As
she sits across from me, swaddled in a fluffy white robe, in a suite at the
oceanfront Terranea resort, in LA, it’s easy to see why.

If you were going to design a modern-day Wonder Woman, she might look
something like Sharapova. When I arrive on the Style shoot, she is clad in
nothing but a Michael Kors one-piece, all 6ft 2in of her athletic frame
vibrating physical power. But her looks — the California tan, the
expensively highlighted blonde mane and the evenly spaced features, accented
by a pair of slanting green eyes — are pure Victoria’s Secret babe. It’s a
killer combination, and one she has played to her advantage. Then there’s
her rags-to-riches story, which reads like a Barbara Taylor Bradford
blockbuster.

Black top, £770, by Reed Krakoff. Black skirt with leather ruffle, £2,145, by Etro. Red pumps, £395, by Christian Louboutin. Black diamond stud earrings, from £569, by Sydney Evan (Kayt Jones)
She was born in Siberia in 1987, but her parents soon moved to Sochi, on the
Black Sea. Here, her father befriended the parents of Yevgeny Kafelnikov,
who would go on to be Russia’s first world No 1-ranked tennis player, and
who passed down his first racket to Sharapova when she was only four. (“We
had to cut down the handle.”) There followed a chance trip to a tennis
clinic in Moscow, where she was one of only a few who got to hit some balls
with none other than Martina Navratilova, who spotted her talent and urged
her parents to develop it. They decided to take their chances in America, so
she went there with her father — and the rest, particularly her famous
Wimbledon win over Serena Williams, the reigning champion, when she was just
17, is Centre Court history.

She must feel incredibly lucky. “It’s funny, the harder you work, the luckier
you get. Ha ha ha!” Her accent is all-American, but with a Slavic chill, and
when she laughs it comes from nowhere, like her fabled killer serve. “But
was it destiny? I think a little bit — everybody has their own path.” Which
is not to say that, behind the scenes, it was all strawberries and
champagne. She didn’t see her mother for two years when she first left
Russia (“It was harder for my mum to lose her husband and daughter”), while
life at the Nick Bollettieri tennis academy, in Florida (where Andre Agassi,
Monica Seles and Anna Kournikova also trained), was tough. “I was much
younger than the other girls and was teased a lot by them,” she has said.

I wonder if she also felt indebted to her parents for sacrificing so much for
her career? She replies without missing a beat, her eyes cool and level: “I
never once felt there was pressure on me to pay them back, because it was
never all or nothing. If it didn’t work out, they had no problem going back
to what we had.”

Besides, she had a dream. She tells me a story about walking around a toy
store with her father when she was eight years old. “ I thought, ‘Wow,
wouldn’t it be amazing if I could buy everything in this store?’ I don’t
know what possessed me to think something like that,” she says. “Almost 20
years later, I look back, and it’s like subconsciously I always had that in
my mind, ‘I want to be able to buy everything on that rack.’ ” She smiles
brightly, but is matter-of-fact. “And now I can.”

So, how money-motivated is she really? “I could never work again and still
have a great life, but there’s not one part of me that wants to stop,” she
says. “And it’s not because I feel the urge to own a private plane.” So it
is all about the winning. And no matter what she says about not owing her
parents anything, she obviously views her millions as a family fortune. “I
take care of my money, because every single dollar I’ve earned represents
the hard work of my parents and me, so I’m very controlling over it. I don’t
hand over my credit card for something I don’t need.”

And there is more to come — much more. Enter her latest venture, a range of
sweets going by the hilarious moniker Sugarpova, which she will unveil in
Britain to coincide with Wimbledon, and which she says she wants to be “the
first brand name people say when they think of gummies”. The idea came about
when her manager, Max Eisenbud, dropped the name in a meeting. “I thought it
was brilliant, so funny and creative,” she says. Sounding like an ersatz
Willy Wonka, she says the name cued instant visions of “candy being
mass-produced in a machine where thousands and thousands of pieces just flow
out. Ha-ha-ha!”

Hang on a minute: with obesity and diabetes such public-health hot potatoes,
don’t people find it a little strange that a professional tennis player is
putting out a range of sweets? Again, her response is as swift and well
practised as her backhand: “Of course, sugar is meant to be bad for you, but
my philosophy has always been ‘everything in moderation’. I’m a big foodie,
and while I’m not going to pig out on three bowls of pasta with truffle and
ricotta cheese the day before a match, do I love that dish? Absolutely.”
Another favourite treat is a cup of tea with raspberry jam, a hangover from
her childhood in Russia. “I always want a little piece of sweet at the end
of a hard day,” she says. “It makes me happy and it makes me feel good.”
Which is all very well when you’re an athlete and “well educated in how your
body reacts to certain foods”, but the message still feels a bit dodgy.

While retirement might be a long way off, she is obviously contemplating her
exit plan from the game on some level. “Where will I be when I’m 50?
Wherever my career takes me. Whatever companies I will own then, life will
still be fun and exciting.”

Following a broken engagement to the pro basketball player Sasha Vujacic in
2011 — “I learnt so much about the things that are important to me and the
kind of life I want to live,” she says of the split — she is currently
playing tonsil tennis with Grigor Dimitrov, a 22-year-old Bulgarian rising
star. The pair were snapped canoodling in Madrid just after we meet (she had
told me she was enjoying the single life), then she appeared to take the
relationship public when she showed up to cheer him on at Queen’s Club, in
London.

Still superclose to her parents (they have houses minutes away from each other
in LA and Florida), she confirms that she is keen to have a family of her
own one day. Her eyes widen when I ask what kind of mother she would be. “Oh
my God. I see my mum and I’m, like, if I was only 5% of what she is, I’d be
happy. She’s so calm, knowledgeable and unselfish. It was never about her.
So I hope I get to do everything I want first, then concentrate on family.”
She backtracks a little. “Although I would still work, because I can’t sit
still.”

For now, though, there are more pressing matters at hand — putting that
Willams back in her place at Wimbledon, for starters. Following the French
Open, I want to know how she picks herself up after a defeat like that, and
with another tournament just around the corner. “You keep moving forward.
Wimbledon is one of my favourites and I want to perform well there,” she
says in an email. And hey, if it doesn’t work out, now she has her very own
candy factory to sweeten the blow.